The Montesol is Ibiza’s oldest hotel. Built in 1933, it’s a neoclassical monolith on a leafy boulevard between the port and the old town of the Spanish island’s capital city. For the last three-quarters of a century, the hotel has hosted generations of Hollywood elite and giants of the music business, while outside Ibiza was transformed from a laid-back haven for 1950s beatniks and bohemians into a Fantasia of mega-clubs, neon lights, giant LED screens and thumping electronic music.
When the French luxury hoteliers Experimental Group took over the property in 2021, they undertook a refurbishment that reflects a new and challenging reality for Ibiza’s tourist industry.
Over the past decade, perennial droughts, population growth and a surge in tourism have meant that fresh water has become increasingly scarce on Ibiza, so the Montesol’s new owners took out the bathtubs in the rooms and only installed showers. Average temperatures have increased by 1.26C (2.7F) in the last 70 years, according to Ibiza Preservation, a non-profit research group, so the hotel put in more insulation to keep the interior cool. To reduce their energy use, they set the minimum temperature for air conditioning to 19C, and equipped windows with a system that turns off the aircon when they open.
“I often get pushback from clients because they want rooms at 16 degrees,” Romée de Goriainoff, one of Experimental Group’s founders said, sitting at the hotel’s street terrace. “People want to be green, but not when it concerns their comfort or their holidays.”
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Last year, 3.7 million tourists visited Ibiza, a 23% rise in eight years. Demand for holiday homes, short lets and housing for seasonal workers, along with an influx of wealthy migrants post-pandemic, has pushed up rents. Experimental Group now has to offer employees accommodation as part of their compensation packages.
Tourism has underpinned economic growth and development in the European Mediterranean for decades. Across the region, it employed more than 8 million people in Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy in 2023 and 2024, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, an industry body. The tourist sector makes up nearly 13% of the gross domestic product of Spain and Greece, more than 10% of Italy’s, and 16.5% of Portugal’s. After a dip during the Covid pandemic, numbers have continued to grow. International arrivals to the European Mediterranean are 8% above 2019 levels, according to UN Tourism, a United Nations agency.
That growth is happening despite — or even because of — climate change. The Mediterranean basin is warming 20% faster than the global average, according to the UN. Average temperatures are already 1.4C higher than the pre-industrial era. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent — wildfires, droughts, dangerous storms and heat waves as summer temperatures rise up to 10C above historical averages several times every year. This August, heat waves have worsened deadly wildfires across Europe and Turkey, forcing the evacuation of thousands of people from homes and resorts. But while the summers are hotter, they’re also longer, bringing more people to the Med in the so-called “shoulder months” outside of the old peak season.
Together, surging tourist numbers and the impacts of climate change are putting unprecedented stress on the ecosystems, economies and societies that support the industry, calling into question the business models that have sustained it for decades.
This year, heat, drought and strong winds have caused wildfires in Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Spain and France. Heat waves in Spain have caused more than 1,100 excess deaths this year, according to the country’s Ministry of Health. Tourist sites across Europe, including the Acropolis in Athens and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, have been shut due to dangerously high temperatures.
However, tourist numbers continue to grow in Europe, driven partly by the changing shape of the tourism season. Across Southern Europe, tourist regions have seen an increase in arrivals in the spring and fall, which is more than offsetting a slight flattening of numbers in the traditional summer peak, which industry analysts put down to a combination of rising temperatures and rising costs.
Greece and Spain, already among the world’s most popular destinations, have experienced rapid growth. In 2024, international arrivals in Greece were up 14.7% over 2019 levels, according to UN Tourism. In Spain, they’re up 12.3%. Hotel room prices are at record levels in both countries, according to real estate analytics company CoStar.
In Barcelona, the shoulder season is becoming so popular that more tourists arrived on cruise ships at its port in October last year than in August 2019, according to the port authority. In several tourist hotspots, including Valencia in Spain and Catania in Italy, vacation rental demand from May to June and in October and November is rising faster than during peak season, compared to 2018 levels, according to data from AirDNA, which tracks the holiday rental market.
Combined, the two trends are increasing the stress on infrastructure. Hotter, drier peak seasons mean more energy demand for air conditioning and more strain on water resources. Longer tourist seasons exacerbate that pressure.
“You can increase shoulder season tourism if you’re then going to invest in the right infrastructure to cope with that volume of tourists,” Xavier Font, professor of sustainability marketing at the University of Surrey in the UK, who advises tourist authorities on sustainable strategies, said. “You cannot do it if you’re now going to treat the shoulder season exactly the same way you treated peak season.”
Along the road between the city of Ibiza and Cala d’en Serra, fluorescent banners with bold black letters advertise “the real Ibiza clubbing experience,” and billboards promise “fierce” partying seven nights a week. It’s an hour’s drive from the Spanish island’s capital to the spot on the northern coast, once one of the island’s most secluded places, and a refuge for those looking to escape the crowds.
Until a few years ago, Cala d’en Serra was home to a dozen rickety huts housing wooden rowboats. Now, it’s overrun with sunbeds and umbrellas spilling out from a beach bar. “Going further away, to wilder and unspoiled places used to be worth it because you were alone,” Laura San Miguel, an Ibiza local and an environmental activist with Friends of the Earth, said. “Not anymore.”
As easier-to-reach spots get busier and busier, tourists have gone deeper into the countryside, overwhelming small places like Cala d’en Serra. But the space has physically shrunk too. A 2024 report by a group of scientific institutions in the Balearic Islands found at least 20% of beaches in Ibiza had visible signs of erosion, and that sea levels around the Balearic Islands have already risen 18.5 centimeters since pre-industrial times.
In 2024, strong gusts of winds during a violent storm pulled up trees in Ibiza's Cala Vedella, while the swell wrecked yachts in the Ses Salines and Es Codolar beaches. Across the island, erosion from waves on the clay cliffs has become common. This year the popular Es Bol Nou beach was closed by authorities due to the risk of falling rocks.
In places, damage done to the marine environment as a consequence of overcrowding and tourism is hastening the erosion of the coastline. The Balearic Islands are partly protected by large areas of posidonia, a slow-growing sea plant that forms a barrier against storms. Although posidonia prairies are protected by law, damage by yachts’ anchors, waste dumping from boats and sea temperature rise has caused them to shrink dramatically, according to Ibiza Preservation. Longer tourism seasons make the problem worse, giving the seagrass less time to recover.
“Our coasts and sea are overwhelmed,” Elisa Langley, coordinator of Ibiza Preservation’s sustainability observatory, said. “If we lose what’s underneath the sea we lose our coast. It’s so contradictory that we’re not taking care of our coast as if it was gold, because that is what brings us the money and the wages.”
Adding to the issues of water quality are discharges from Ibiza’s three desalination plants, themselves a key part of the island’s attempts to adapt to scarcity. During the summer months, the plants are working constantly, without their usual scheduled stops for maintenance. This July, the island’s reservoirs and underground water reserves were at less than one-third of their total capacity, according to the regional Balearic government. Without enough rain to replenish the reserves, the island is drying up.
Spending on water infrastructure — including supply, desalination and treatment — has more than tripled in the past decade, with the Balearic Islands’ regional government spending more than €166 million ($192 million) last year across Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera.
The Balearic Islands collect a sustainable tourism tax of up to €6 per person per night, the proceeds of which are earmarked for initiatives to reduce the industry’s social and environmental impact. However, the tax take has been used to fund projects, including conference facilities and sports centers, aimed at bringing in more off-season tourists. Critics said that doesn’t divert tourists from the peak months. “Nothing changes during summer and everything is crowded the rest of the year,” San Miguel said. “The tourist tax should go into solving the problems we already have, before even thinking about bringing more tourists in.”
The growing volume of tourists is increasing economic pressures for locals, who are already struggling with high rents. There are days in August when the number of people on the island doubles the usual population of 161,000, Juan Miguel Costa, Ibiza’s tourism director, said. “I don’t know what the limit is, but over the long term all destinations will have to find out how many people they can absorb.”
Three out of five Spanish cities with the highest rents are in Ibiza, according to data by real estate platform Idealista. In the Balearic islands, people spend on average two-thirds of their salaries on rent. Authorities in Ibiza are struggling to recruit police and healthcare workers, because they often can’t afford accommodation.
“The island’s resources are not infinite,” Costa said. “We need to find a balance between the pressures of tourism and the pressures of local residents.”
The coronavirus pandemic hit the tourist industry hard, with an overall $2.5 trillion loss in tourism revenues globally between 2020 and 2022, according to UN Tourism. In places that had become used to overcrowded streets in summer, it also reminded locals what their cities were like before the era of mass tourism.
The industry has since rebounded beyond pre-pandemic levels. The sheer number of tourists in some destinations has created conflict between locals and visitors. Cruises, buses, planes and rental cars are making cities more crowded and polluted. Golf courses and swimming pools compete with other industries and local residents for water, contributing to shortages in drought-stricken areas. The growth of platforms, such as AirBnB, which facilitate private rentals of residential properties, has helped to drive up rents.
Graffiti demanding “Tourists go home” is daubed on walls across Mediterranean cities. In recent months, anti-tourism protests have broken out in Tenerife and Barcelona in Spain, Venice in Italy and in Lisbon in Portugal. In Greece, workers protested against the industry's long hours and low wages, while people in Athens’ Koukaki district protested increasing rental prices with graffiti reading: “Airbnb everywhere, neighbors nowhere.”
Last year, the Catalan government imposed restrictions on water use during a drought, but hotels and other tourist businesses were largely exempt.
“I understand why the residents complained, because yet again, it proves that residents are second class citizens,” Font, who is from Barcelona, said. “We have to remember that we are developing tourism to first and foremost create a good quality of life for residents, as opposed to a playground for the tourists. I think we have forgotten it.”
Luís de Gouveia Fernandes runs a secluded farm at the gates of the village of Comporta, a laidback coastal retreat in the Alentejo region of Portugal, about a 90-minute drive south of Lisbon. Historically Portugal’s breadbasket, Alentejo is still home to much of the country’s traditional agriculture. Its sandy soil is well-suited for growing stone pine trees, which produce the pine nuts used to make pesto.
“Two or three years ago the trees stopped producing pine nuts,” Gouveia Fernandes, a retired lawyer whose family has been involved in farming for more than three generations, said as he pointed to a couple of dried up trees. “They’re too weak to bear fruit because access to water is much harder these days.”
Since 2017, Alentejo has been at the center of a new tourist boom, as visitors seek out an alternative to the overcrowded Algarve. Now private villas, hotels and golf resorts dot the Alentejo coast. The rush of development is contributing to intense competition for water resources between agriculture and tourism in a region that was already one of Europe’s driest. As climate change drives average temperatures higher and makes rainfall less reliable, the challenges of balancing water use are only going to become more acute, calling into question the sustainability of both industries.
“It’s vital for the government, businesses and local communities to work together to ensure development is sustainable,” said Jose Santos, president of the Alentejo Regional Tourism Promotion Agency, a public-private partnership. “It’s a challenge of gigantic magnitudes.”
In the 1950s, Portugal’s Espirito Santo banking dynasty owned most of the land in Comporta, converting old fishing huts into holiday homes and turning endless miles of empty dunes into their private playground. Following the collapse of the Espirito Santo family empire in 2014, several plots were sold to developers. American celebrities and European royalty began flocking to the quaint towns of Comporta and nearby Melides, drawn to the area’s natural beauty and the promise of understated luxury. Now, billboards promoting the sale of multi-million luxury homes have become a common sight along the roads that connect Comporta to the nearby towns. A giant billboard on the side of the road greets visitors with: “Welcome to Paradise.”
Portugal attracted a record 31.6 million tourists in 2024. Construction in Alentejo is surging to keep up with demand: the number of accommodation units in the area is expected to increase fivefold over the next five to 10 years, according to the Alentejo Regional Tourism Promotion Agency. Vanguard Properties, one of Portugal’s biggest developers, is building several residential and hotel projects in Comporta, including two golf courses.
Jose Theotonio, chief executive officer of Pestana Hotel Group, Portugal’s biggest hotel operator, said the environmental impact of tourism in the region is still far from reaching breaking point. “You can walk for kilometers and kilometers along the beach without seeing anyone — the density is very low,” he said by phone during his vacation in Troia, a resort just north of Comporta. He says the water problem in the region could be solved with more desalination plants, a solution his company uses in some of its African resorts.
But locals warn that the pressure on the water supply threatens the landscapes that attracted tourists to the region in the first place. In Melides — where US-based real estate developer Discovery Land Company is building an ultra-luxury residential community called CostaTerra, with almost 150 properties going for millions of dollars next to a Tom Fazio-designed golf course — shrinking water levels are threatening a famous lagoon. “The water from the lagoon used to come all the way up here,” said Fernanda Freitas, a pensioner, gesturing to the sand under her feet. “If we don’t stop the lagoon will disappear one day.”
She says property developments, climate change and excessive farming are all combining to deplete resources. Freitas also said many locals she knows have left the region as tourism drives up rents. Rice farmers, who have for a century relied on the river that feeds the lagoon, fear their livelihoods are at risk.
Alexandra Betâmio De Almeida, director of environment and sustainability at CostaTerra, says the resort is studying the use of desalinated water for irrigation and restricts water usage at its golf course. All buildings are required to repurpose rainwater for landscaping, she said. “We have committed to strict environmental compliance.”
The conflict over water in Alentejo isn’t simplistically a struggle between traditional farming and tourism. A push to cultivate higher-yielding crops like avocado and berries is adding to the strain on resources. Right on Gouveia Fernandes’ doorstep is the site of a large-scale avocado project developed by Aquaterra, a Portuguese producer of avocados and tangerines backed by US investment firm Davidson Kempner. Authorities rejected the initial project last year after local farmers and activists raised concerns about the plan’s excessive water usage. It is currently under review. A representative for Aquaterra declined to comment.
Jose Santos, whose mission at the Alentejo Regional Tourism Promotion Agency is to promote the region abroad, says protecting local interests and the natural landscape is the top priority. It’s why most construction projects now need to go through rigorous environmental assessments, he says. “We’re conscious and we’re concerned,’’ said Santos. “We see this region as one of the main tourism destinations in Europe. But we need to make sure people will still want to come here in the future.”
In 2024, Spain’s La Caixa bank used spending data from thousands of foreign credit cards in previous summers and overlaid it with weather data from Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation agency. They found that for each additional degree of temperature tourists spend 0.12% less. When temperatures rise 5C or more above the historical average, tourists are less inclined to go back to that destination.
“Too often the travel industry sees [extreme weather events] as one-offs,” said Patrick Richards, director at TerraVerde, a UK sustainability consultancy focusing on reducing the environmental and climate impact of the tourism sector. “They’re taking it as business-as-usual operations. And increasingly they need to wake up to the fact that this is raising their costs from all sorts of angles.”
Even if extreme heat, wildfires and sudden torrential rains make Southern European destinations less predictably attractive than they used to be, it’s unlikely that demand will drop off a cliff. Tourists’ habits are slow to change, and many countries’ school holidays are in July and August, forcing families with children to travel during these dates.
“People’s imagination is slow to adapt — it's a very long slow process for people to disengage from traditional holiday patterns,” said Tom Jenkins, chief executive officer at ETOA, a European trade association representing tour operators. “There’s a tradition of beach holidays, it’s what people expect to do and it will take generations for them to stop doing this.”
Even so, more northerly destinations, including Scandinavian countries, have reported a rise in tourist numbers, which some attribute to “coolcationing” — visitors looking for less sweltering getaways. Cooler locations within the Mediterranean are also experiencing a rise in visitors, including Spain’s northern regions and parts of the Italian Alps.
“The travel industry has had such a broad choice in the past of destinations that it has somewhat developed a throwaway mentality – we’ll go to one destination and if it loses attraction, we move on to the next destination,” Richards said. “That needs to stop because you’ll run out of destinations.”
But the solution to the accelerating feedback loop of overtourism and climate change might seem unpalatable to destinations that have focused for years on trying to maximize arrivals. Experts say that destinations need fewer tourists, who stay longer but tread more lightly.
Whether authorities are willing to do that isn’t clear. Although many have started to talk about sustainability, there is a lot of “smoke and mirrors,” the University of Surrey’s Font said. The primary function of tourism management agencies is still to bring as many people through the airports as possible. “How many of your staff are working on management and sustainability?” he said. “And are you still telling me that 95% of your budget is on marketing? That tells me who you are.”
Georg Rabanser is a former professional snowboarder living near the slopes of Seceda in the northern Italian region of Trentino-South Tyrol. Seceda, a mountain in the Dolomites, has jagged peaks rising to around 2,500 meters from velvety alpine meadows. Since 2023, it has been flooded with visitors, after it was featured in an iPhone advert. Just in the last few weeks, a reported 8,000 people have come to the mountain.
“We can't afford such rising inflows of people, who leave trash everywhere and are not respectful of nature at all, treating the mountains like a dump,” Rabanser, 52, said. So, in July, he and a group of other landowners erected a private gate on their properties leading to the mountains to control the flow of people, charging €5 per adult to access the mountain trails.
Little seems to deter visitors, however. In late July images of the long queues at a cable car that carries people to the summit of Seceda went viral on social media, becoming a symbol of overtourism in Italy. Instead of pushing people to different places, locals say it just generated more buzz, and brought even more visitors. Even a series of rock-slides over the past few weeks — likely caused by the melting of permafrosts due to rising temperatures — hasn’t put hikers off.
While social media is a factor in pulling people to the mountains, many are also escaping the heat in other parts of the country. Temperatures have edged up to 40C in parts of Italy this summer, and tourists are increasingly avoiding the hot, crowded and expensive seaside locations and heading to higher ground.
In 2024 Trentino autonomous province hosted more than 19 million overnight stays, with a peak of about 4 million people in August. This summer it’s poised to match last year’s record, according to Fedeberalghi, the national hoteliers association. The tourist sector accounts for around 10% of Trentino’s GDP, equal to about €2.5 billion.
The summer boom is typically short, lasting from late June to the end of August, since hotel owners usually shut down for an extended break after the ski season. Still, the mountains have little time to recover, and rising summer numbers are putting a strain on infrastructure and local communities.
“A village with 1,000 inhabitants can even reach 15,000 in a few weeks, but of course it’s not designed for that,” says Franco Nicolini, who has been an Alpine guide and host at the high altitude Rifugio Tosa Pedrotti in the Dolomites since 2011. “All the infrastructure, water, sewerage, and other services are not structured for that. If we continue to build apartments and hotels the existing basic infrastructure will no longer be sufficient, we need to slow down.”
The surge of tourists — many of whom aren’t expert mountaineers — has put pressure on the alpine rescue services, with a 12% rise in interventions this year. The occupancy rate of public hospitals and trauma centers has risen, traffic jams are common, and the local authorities have had to plan more parking lots in and around tourism locations close to the Dolomites, which has been a United Nations World Heritage Site since 2009. The demand for short-term rentals in both the summer and the winter has driven up the price of housing for residents and workers. During the off-season, the area empties out.
The local authorities are trying to spread the burden of tourism out across the year. Prime urban locations in the financial capital of Milan have in past years been plastered with advertisements from Trentino Marketing, an agency run by the province, reading: “Respira, sei in Trentino,” (Breathe, you are in Trentino). The agency is launching a new slogan to go alongside its old one: “Le belle stagioni” (the beautiful seasons), and its next campaigns will focus on trying to get visitors to come in spring or fall.
“Promoting the off-season is not just because we want tourists but primarily because this would help us create greater balance,” Giulia Dalla Palma, head of destination development at Trentino Marketing, said. The current model of tourism in the region has to change, she said. “This is a model that no longer works, and this is what worries us, this model where even the local community is starting to struggle to survive because of peaks of stress and then moments of instability.”
When the French luxury hoteliers Experimental Group took over the property in 2021, they undertook a refurbishment that reflects a new and challenging reality for Ibiza’s tourist industry.
Over the past decade, perennial droughts, population growth and a surge in tourism have meant that fresh water has become increasingly scarce on Ibiza, so the Montesol’s new owners took out the bathtubs in the rooms and only installed showers. Average temperatures have increased by 1.26C (2.7F) in the last 70 years, according to Ibiza Preservation, a non-profit research group, so the hotel put in more insulation to keep the interior cool. To reduce their energy use, they set the minimum temperature for air conditioning to 19C, and equipped windows with a system that turns off the aircon when they open.
“I often get pushback from clients because they want rooms at 16 degrees,” Romée de Goriainoff, one of Experimental Group’s founders said, sitting at the hotel’s street terrace. “People want to be green, but not when it concerns their comfort or their holidays.”
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Last year, 3.7 million tourists visited Ibiza, a 23% rise in eight years. Demand for holiday homes, short lets and housing for seasonal workers, along with an influx of wealthy migrants post-pandemic, has pushed up rents. Experimental Group now has to offer employees accommodation as part of their compensation packages.
Tourism has underpinned economic growth and development in the European Mediterranean for decades. Across the region, it employed more than 8 million people in Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy in 2023 and 2024, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, an industry body. The tourist sector makes up nearly 13% of the gross domestic product of Spain and Greece, more than 10% of Italy’s, and 16.5% of Portugal’s. After a dip during the Covid pandemic, numbers have continued to grow. International arrivals to the European Mediterranean are 8% above 2019 levels, according to UN Tourism, a United Nations agency.
That growth is happening despite — or even because of — climate change. The Mediterranean basin is warming 20% faster than the global average, according to the UN. Average temperatures are already 1.4C higher than the pre-industrial era. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent — wildfires, droughts, dangerous storms and heat waves as summer temperatures rise up to 10C above historical averages several times every year. This August, heat waves have worsened deadly wildfires across Europe and Turkey, forcing the evacuation of thousands of people from homes and resorts. But while the summers are hotter, they’re also longer, bringing more people to the Med in the so-called “shoulder months” outside of the old peak season.
Together, surging tourist numbers and the impacts of climate change are putting unprecedented stress on the ecosystems, economies and societies that support the industry, calling into question the business models that have sustained it for decades.
This year, heat, drought and strong winds have caused wildfires in Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Spain and France. Heat waves in Spain have caused more than 1,100 excess deaths this year, according to the country’s Ministry of Health. Tourist sites across Europe, including the Acropolis in Athens and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, have been shut due to dangerously high temperatures.
However, tourist numbers continue to grow in Europe, driven partly by the changing shape of the tourism season. Across Southern Europe, tourist regions have seen an increase in arrivals in the spring and fall, which is more than offsetting a slight flattening of numbers in the traditional summer peak, which industry analysts put down to a combination of rising temperatures and rising costs.
Greece and Spain, already among the world’s most popular destinations, have experienced rapid growth. In 2024, international arrivals in Greece were up 14.7% over 2019 levels, according to UN Tourism. In Spain, they’re up 12.3%. Hotel room prices are at record levels in both countries, according to real estate analytics company CoStar.
In Barcelona, the shoulder season is becoming so popular that more tourists arrived on cruise ships at its port in October last year than in August 2019, according to the port authority. In several tourist hotspots, including Valencia in Spain and Catania in Italy, vacation rental demand from May to June and in October and November is rising faster than during peak season, compared to 2018 levels, according to data from AirDNA, which tracks the holiday rental market.
Combined, the two trends are increasing the stress on infrastructure. Hotter, drier peak seasons mean more energy demand for air conditioning and more strain on water resources. Longer tourist seasons exacerbate that pressure.
“You can increase shoulder season tourism if you’re then going to invest in the right infrastructure to cope with that volume of tourists,” Xavier Font, professor of sustainability marketing at the University of Surrey in the UK, who advises tourist authorities on sustainable strategies, said. “You cannot do it if you’re now going to treat the shoulder season exactly the same way you treated peak season.”
Along the road between the city of Ibiza and Cala d’en Serra, fluorescent banners with bold black letters advertise “the real Ibiza clubbing experience,” and billboards promise “fierce” partying seven nights a week. It’s an hour’s drive from the Spanish island’s capital to the spot on the northern coast, once one of the island’s most secluded places, and a refuge for those looking to escape the crowds.
Until a few years ago, Cala d’en Serra was home to a dozen rickety huts housing wooden rowboats. Now, it’s overrun with sunbeds and umbrellas spilling out from a beach bar. “Going further away, to wilder and unspoiled places used to be worth it because you were alone,” Laura San Miguel, an Ibiza local and an environmental activist with Friends of the Earth, said. “Not anymore.”
As easier-to-reach spots get busier and busier, tourists have gone deeper into the countryside, overwhelming small places like Cala d’en Serra. But the space has physically shrunk too. A 2024 report by a group of scientific institutions in the Balearic Islands found at least 20% of beaches in Ibiza had visible signs of erosion, and that sea levels around the Balearic Islands have already risen 18.5 centimeters since pre-industrial times.
In 2024, strong gusts of winds during a violent storm pulled up trees in Ibiza's Cala Vedella, while the swell wrecked yachts in the Ses Salines and Es Codolar beaches. Across the island, erosion from waves on the clay cliffs has become common. This year the popular Es Bol Nou beach was closed by authorities due to the risk of falling rocks.
In places, damage done to the marine environment as a consequence of overcrowding and tourism is hastening the erosion of the coastline. The Balearic Islands are partly protected by large areas of posidonia, a slow-growing sea plant that forms a barrier against storms. Although posidonia prairies are protected by law, damage by yachts’ anchors, waste dumping from boats and sea temperature rise has caused them to shrink dramatically, according to Ibiza Preservation. Longer tourism seasons make the problem worse, giving the seagrass less time to recover.
“Our coasts and sea are overwhelmed,” Elisa Langley, coordinator of Ibiza Preservation’s sustainability observatory, said. “If we lose what’s underneath the sea we lose our coast. It’s so contradictory that we’re not taking care of our coast as if it was gold, because that is what brings us the money and the wages.”
Adding to the issues of water quality are discharges from Ibiza’s three desalination plants, themselves a key part of the island’s attempts to adapt to scarcity. During the summer months, the plants are working constantly, without their usual scheduled stops for maintenance. This July, the island’s reservoirs and underground water reserves were at less than one-third of their total capacity, according to the regional Balearic government. Without enough rain to replenish the reserves, the island is drying up.
Spending on water infrastructure — including supply, desalination and treatment — has more than tripled in the past decade, with the Balearic Islands’ regional government spending more than €166 million ($192 million) last year across Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera.
The Balearic Islands collect a sustainable tourism tax of up to €6 per person per night, the proceeds of which are earmarked for initiatives to reduce the industry’s social and environmental impact. However, the tax take has been used to fund projects, including conference facilities and sports centers, aimed at bringing in more off-season tourists. Critics said that doesn’t divert tourists from the peak months. “Nothing changes during summer and everything is crowded the rest of the year,” San Miguel said. “The tourist tax should go into solving the problems we already have, before even thinking about bringing more tourists in.”
The growing volume of tourists is increasing economic pressures for locals, who are already struggling with high rents. There are days in August when the number of people on the island doubles the usual population of 161,000, Juan Miguel Costa, Ibiza’s tourism director, said. “I don’t know what the limit is, but over the long term all destinations will have to find out how many people they can absorb.”
Three out of five Spanish cities with the highest rents are in Ibiza, according to data by real estate platform Idealista. In the Balearic islands, people spend on average two-thirds of their salaries on rent. Authorities in Ibiza are struggling to recruit police and healthcare workers, because they often can’t afford accommodation.
“The island’s resources are not infinite,” Costa said. “We need to find a balance between the pressures of tourism and the pressures of local residents.”
The coronavirus pandemic hit the tourist industry hard, with an overall $2.5 trillion loss in tourism revenues globally between 2020 and 2022, according to UN Tourism. In places that had become used to overcrowded streets in summer, it also reminded locals what their cities were like before the era of mass tourism.
The industry has since rebounded beyond pre-pandemic levels. The sheer number of tourists in some destinations has created conflict between locals and visitors. Cruises, buses, planes and rental cars are making cities more crowded and polluted. Golf courses and swimming pools compete with other industries and local residents for water, contributing to shortages in drought-stricken areas. The growth of platforms, such as AirBnB, which facilitate private rentals of residential properties, has helped to drive up rents.
Graffiti demanding “Tourists go home” is daubed on walls across Mediterranean cities. In recent months, anti-tourism protests have broken out in Tenerife and Barcelona in Spain, Venice in Italy and in Lisbon in Portugal. In Greece, workers protested against the industry's long hours and low wages, while people in Athens’ Koukaki district protested increasing rental prices with graffiti reading: “Airbnb everywhere, neighbors nowhere.”
Last year, the Catalan government imposed restrictions on water use during a drought, but hotels and other tourist businesses were largely exempt.
“I understand why the residents complained, because yet again, it proves that residents are second class citizens,” Font, who is from Barcelona, said. “We have to remember that we are developing tourism to first and foremost create a good quality of life for residents, as opposed to a playground for the tourists. I think we have forgotten it.”
Luís de Gouveia Fernandes runs a secluded farm at the gates of the village of Comporta, a laidback coastal retreat in the Alentejo region of Portugal, about a 90-minute drive south of Lisbon. Historically Portugal’s breadbasket, Alentejo is still home to much of the country’s traditional agriculture. Its sandy soil is well-suited for growing stone pine trees, which produce the pine nuts used to make pesto.
“Two or three years ago the trees stopped producing pine nuts,” Gouveia Fernandes, a retired lawyer whose family has been involved in farming for more than three generations, said as he pointed to a couple of dried up trees. “They’re too weak to bear fruit because access to water is much harder these days.”
Since 2017, Alentejo has been at the center of a new tourist boom, as visitors seek out an alternative to the overcrowded Algarve. Now private villas, hotels and golf resorts dot the Alentejo coast. The rush of development is contributing to intense competition for water resources between agriculture and tourism in a region that was already one of Europe’s driest. As climate change drives average temperatures higher and makes rainfall less reliable, the challenges of balancing water use are only going to become more acute, calling into question the sustainability of both industries.
“It’s vital for the government, businesses and local communities to work together to ensure development is sustainable,” said Jose Santos, president of the Alentejo Regional Tourism Promotion Agency, a public-private partnership. “It’s a challenge of gigantic magnitudes.”
In the 1950s, Portugal’s Espirito Santo banking dynasty owned most of the land in Comporta, converting old fishing huts into holiday homes and turning endless miles of empty dunes into their private playground. Following the collapse of the Espirito Santo family empire in 2014, several plots were sold to developers. American celebrities and European royalty began flocking to the quaint towns of Comporta and nearby Melides, drawn to the area’s natural beauty and the promise of understated luxury. Now, billboards promoting the sale of multi-million luxury homes have become a common sight along the roads that connect Comporta to the nearby towns. A giant billboard on the side of the road greets visitors with: “Welcome to Paradise.”
Portugal attracted a record 31.6 million tourists in 2024. Construction in Alentejo is surging to keep up with demand: the number of accommodation units in the area is expected to increase fivefold over the next five to 10 years, according to the Alentejo Regional Tourism Promotion Agency. Vanguard Properties, one of Portugal’s biggest developers, is building several residential and hotel projects in Comporta, including two golf courses.
Jose Theotonio, chief executive officer of Pestana Hotel Group, Portugal’s biggest hotel operator, said the environmental impact of tourism in the region is still far from reaching breaking point. “You can walk for kilometers and kilometers along the beach without seeing anyone — the density is very low,” he said by phone during his vacation in Troia, a resort just north of Comporta. He says the water problem in the region could be solved with more desalination plants, a solution his company uses in some of its African resorts.
But locals warn that the pressure on the water supply threatens the landscapes that attracted tourists to the region in the first place. In Melides — where US-based real estate developer Discovery Land Company is building an ultra-luxury residential community called CostaTerra, with almost 150 properties going for millions of dollars next to a Tom Fazio-designed golf course — shrinking water levels are threatening a famous lagoon. “The water from the lagoon used to come all the way up here,” said Fernanda Freitas, a pensioner, gesturing to the sand under her feet. “If we don’t stop the lagoon will disappear one day.”
She says property developments, climate change and excessive farming are all combining to deplete resources. Freitas also said many locals she knows have left the region as tourism drives up rents. Rice farmers, who have for a century relied on the river that feeds the lagoon, fear their livelihoods are at risk.
Alexandra Betâmio De Almeida, director of environment and sustainability at CostaTerra, says the resort is studying the use of desalinated water for irrigation and restricts water usage at its golf course. All buildings are required to repurpose rainwater for landscaping, she said. “We have committed to strict environmental compliance.”
The conflict over water in Alentejo isn’t simplistically a struggle between traditional farming and tourism. A push to cultivate higher-yielding crops like avocado and berries is adding to the strain on resources. Right on Gouveia Fernandes’ doorstep is the site of a large-scale avocado project developed by Aquaterra, a Portuguese producer of avocados and tangerines backed by US investment firm Davidson Kempner. Authorities rejected the initial project last year after local farmers and activists raised concerns about the plan’s excessive water usage. It is currently under review. A representative for Aquaterra declined to comment.
Jose Santos, whose mission at the Alentejo Regional Tourism Promotion Agency is to promote the region abroad, says protecting local interests and the natural landscape is the top priority. It’s why most construction projects now need to go through rigorous environmental assessments, he says. “We’re conscious and we’re concerned,’’ said Santos. “We see this region as one of the main tourism destinations in Europe. But we need to make sure people will still want to come here in the future.”
In 2024, Spain’s La Caixa bank used spending data from thousands of foreign credit cards in previous summers and overlaid it with weather data from Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation agency. They found that for each additional degree of temperature tourists spend 0.12% less. When temperatures rise 5C or more above the historical average, tourists are less inclined to go back to that destination.
“Too often the travel industry sees [extreme weather events] as one-offs,” said Patrick Richards, director at TerraVerde, a UK sustainability consultancy focusing on reducing the environmental and climate impact of the tourism sector. “They’re taking it as business-as-usual operations. And increasingly they need to wake up to the fact that this is raising their costs from all sorts of angles.”
Even if extreme heat, wildfires and sudden torrential rains make Southern European destinations less predictably attractive than they used to be, it’s unlikely that demand will drop off a cliff. Tourists’ habits are slow to change, and many countries’ school holidays are in July and August, forcing families with children to travel during these dates.
“People’s imagination is slow to adapt — it's a very long slow process for people to disengage from traditional holiday patterns,” said Tom Jenkins, chief executive officer at ETOA, a European trade association representing tour operators. “There’s a tradition of beach holidays, it’s what people expect to do and it will take generations for them to stop doing this.”
Even so, more northerly destinations, including Scandinavian countries, have reported a rise in tourist numbers, which some attribute to “coolcationing” — visitors looking for less sweltering getaways. Cooler locations within the Mediterranean are also experiencing a rise in visitors, including Spain’s northern regions and parts of the Italian Alps.
“The travel industry has had such a broad choice in the past of destinations that it has somewhat developed a throwaway mentality – we’ll go to one destination and if it loses attraction, we move on to the next destination,” Richards said. “That needs to stop because you’ll run out of destinations.”
But the solution to the accelerating feedback loop of overtourism and climate change might seem unpalatable to destinations that have focused for years on trying to maximize arrivals. Experts say that destinations need fewer tourists, who stay longer but tread more lightly.
Whether authorities are willing to do that isn’t clear. Although many have started to talk about sustainability, there is a lot of “smoke and mirrors,” the University of Surrey’s Font said. The primary function of tourism management agencies is still to bring as many people through the airports as possible. “How many of your staff are working on management and sustainability?” he said. “And are you still telling me that 95% of your budget is on marketing? That tells me who you are.”
Georg Rabanser is a former professional snowboarder living near the slopes of Seceda in the northern Italian region of Trentino-South Tyrol. Seceda, a mountain in the Dolomites, has jagged peaks rising to around 2,500 meters from velvety alpine meadows. Since 2023, it has been flooded with visitors, after it was featured in an iPhone advert. Just in the last few weeks, a reported 8,000 people have come to the mountain.
“We can't afford such rising inflows of people, who leave trash everywhere and are not respectful of nature at all, treating the mountains like a dump,” Rabanser, 52, said. So, in July, he and a group of other landowners erected a private gate on their properties leading to the mountains to control the flow of people, charging €5 per adult to access the mountain trails.
Little seems to deter visitors, however. In late July images of the long queues at a cable car that carries people to the summit of Seceda went viral on social media, becoming a symbol of overtourism in Italy. Instead of pushing people to different places, locals say it just generated more buzz, and brought even more visitors. Even a series of rock-slides over the past few weeks — likely caused by the melting of permafrosts due to rising temperatures — hasn’t put hikers off.
While social media is a factor in pulling people to the mountains, many are also escaping the heat in other parts of the country. Temperatures have edged up to 40C in parts of Italy this summer, and tourists are increasingly avoiding the hot, crowded and expensive seaside locations and heading to higher ground.
In 2024 Trentino autonomous province hosted more than 19 million overnight stays, with a peak of about 4 million people in August. This summer it’s poised to match last year’s record, according to Fedeberalghi, the national hoteliers association. The tourist sector accounts for around 10% of Trentino’s GDP, equal to about €2.5 billion.
The summer boom is typically short, lasting from late June to the end of August, since hotel owners usually shut down for an extended break after the ski season. Still, the mountains have little time to recover, and rising summer numbers are putting a strain on infrastructure and local communities.
“A village with 1,000 inhabitants can even reach 15,000 in a few weeks, but of course it’s not designed for that,” says Franco Nicolini, who has been an Alpine guide and host at the high altitude Rifugio Tosa Pedrotti in the Dolomites since 2011. “All the infrastructure, water, sewerage, and other services are not structured for that. If we continue to build apartments and hotels the existing basic infrastructure will no longer be sufficient, we need to slow down.”
The surge of tourists — many of whom aren’t expert mountaineers — has put pressure on the alpine rescue services, with a 12% rise in interventions this year. The occupancy rate of public hospitals and trauma centers has risen, traffic jams are common, and the local authorities have had to plan more parking lots in and around tourism locations close to the Dolomites, which has been a United Nations World Heritage Site since 2009. The demand for short-term rentals in both the summer and the winter has driven up the price of housing for residents and workers. During the off-season, the area empties out.
The local authorities are trying to spread the burden of tourism out across the year. Prime urban locations in the financial capital of Milan have in past years been plastered with advertisements from Trentino Marketing, an agency run by the province, reading: “Respira, sei in Trentino,” (Breathe, you are in Trentino). The agency is launching a new slogan to go alongside its old one: “Le belle stagioni” (the beautiful seasons), and its next campaigns will focus on trying to get visitors to come in spring or fall.
“Promoting the off-season is not just because we want tourists but primarily because this would help us create greater balance,” Giulia Dalla Palma, head of destination development at Trentino Marketing, said. The current model of tourism in the region has to change, she said. “This is a model that no longer works, and this is what worries us, this model where even the local community is starting to struggle to survive because of peaks of stress and then moments of instability.”
